Henning Mankell, Swedish crime writer, dies aged 67 Henning Mankell, Swedish crime writer, dies aged 67 Credit: DPA / EPA FILE/BRITTAÂ PEDERSEN Alice Vincent 5 October 2015 • 12:14pm The Swedish crime writer behind the Wallander series, Henning Mankell, died on Sunday after suffering from cancer. He was 67. Mankell was a leading figure in the Nordic Noir genre after creating his most famous character, Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander, whom he based a series of novels between 1991 and 2009. Wallander solved crimes across the world, and the literary series achieved further recognition when it was turned into a TV series, Wallander in 2005 and again for the UK in 2008, starring Kenneth Branagh.

Credit: Left Bank Pictures/Laurence Cendrowicz/Laurence Cendrowicz,Media Mogul Henning Mankell interview: I'm not afraid of dying Mankell was diagnosed with cancer in January 2014, and wrote about his treatment column for Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, admitting that his "anxiety is very profound". His agent, Leopard Forlag, confirmed the death on Monday morning, saying: "He passed away quietly last night in the wake of disease." "Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end" A statement on Mankell's website read : "Henning Mankell is dead. He died in his sleep early this morning in Göteborg. He was 67 years old. "Henning Mankell was one of the great Swedish authors of our time, loved by readers in Sweden and all over the world. His work includes around 40 novels and numerous plays. His books have sold more than 40 million copies and are translated into more than 40 languages.

Henning Mankell interview: my mother's abandonment drove me on "Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end." He wrote about his experience of the disease in his most recent book, Quicksand: What it Means to be a Human Being, to be published next year. Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948, and started his career in the city as a dramatist. He also wrote books for children throughout his career. Mankell dedicated time and money to various political and charitable causes, notably to charities in Mozambique and other African countries. View gallery Credit:Reuters/Rex Features Wallender first came to life in his 1989 novel Faceless Killers, after Mankell found the name by flipping through a telephone directory. The detective was diabetic, and the opposite of the suave and glamourous detectives found in other crime fiction. Mankell told The Telegraph in 2011 that he gave Wallender diabetes, which made him more popular as a character. "You could never imagine James Bond giving himself a shot of insulin, but with Wallander it seemed perfectly natural," he said.

Mankell is survived by his wife, Swedish director and dramatist Eva Bergman, and son Jon Mankell. Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies Updated / Oct. 5, 2015 22:36 Writer Henning Mankell has died aged 67 Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell has died, aged 67 after battling cancer. He earned a global reputation for his novels featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander. One of the figureheads of the so-called 'Scandi-noir' brand of fiction, his books sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Following his diagnosis with cancer last year, he admitted that his "anxiety (was) very profound." He dealt with the experience of serious illness in his most recent book Quicksand: What It Means To Be A Human Being. His publisher said on it's website that "He passed away quietly last night in the wake of disease". Mankell was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize, among many others.

Kenneth Branagh in Wallander His best-selling mystery novels follow policeman Kurt Wallander through Sweden and Mozambique and were turned into a hugely popular BAFTA award winning TV drama starring Kenneth Branagh. Today Branagh paid tribute to him saying, "In life and in art Henning Mankell was a man of passionate commitment. I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity." The original, Swedish version of Wallander - featuring Krister Henriksson in the title role - was also screened on BBC Four in the UK. Mankell is survived by his his wife of seventeen years, Eva Bergman, the daughter of legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and his son, Jon Mankell, a film producer who helped bring Stieg Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series to the big screen. sorry to hear of the death of Henning Mankell. His #wallender books were classics. — Sheila O'Flanagan (@sheilaoflanagan) October 5, 2015 I interviewed Henning Mankell @edbookfest a few years back, just as his books were being published in English. His life read like a novel.

— Ian Rankin (@Beathhigh) October 5, 2015 RIP Henning Mankell, and thank you. — Arlene Hunt (@arlenehunt) October 5, 2015 View Comments Henning Mankell obituary | Books | The Guardian Henning Mankell obituary Swedish crime writer best known for his Kurt Wallander books who was a dedicated political activist Henning Mankell in Visby, Sweden, in 2003. ‘I work best when imagination is as valuable as reality,’ he once said. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Monday 5 October 2015 07.37 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 09.08 EDT Share on Messenger Close Henning Mankell, who has died aged 67, after being diagnosed with cancer last year , established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia.

He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world. His tone is perfectly captured in the first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers (1991), when the detective comes across a murder scene: “Wallander thought of his own wife, who had left him, and wondered where to begin. A bestial murder, he thought. And if we’re really unlucky, it’ll be a double murder.” There were other, contemporary figures of middle-aged male detectives being dragged through their future backwards as if it were a briar hedge – most obviously Ian Rankin ’s Inspector Rebus – but Wallander was the purest example and probably the most successful one. He first appeared when Sweden was in the middle of a precipitate retreat from the optimistic utopianism of the 1960s and 70s, so that the corruption and decay of the hero found an echo in the corruption and decay of the society around him.

Henning Mankell, Swedish author of Wallander, dies at 67 Read more Rebus’s Edinburgh had never been a shining city, but Wallander picked his melancholy way like Eeyore through the thistly ruins of the New Jerusalem. It proved a remarkably popular journey. After a slow start, the 10 Wallander novels (plus a volume of short stories and a novel centred on Wallander’s daughter, Linda, in which he also featured) sold millions of copies in various languages. Two separate Swedish television series were made featuring the character, who took on a life of his own within them: both were sold around the world, as was a BBC adaptation, featuring Kenneth Branagh. As the series progressed, Wallander seemed to become more miserable: “Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing work day, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion,” he reflected in the last novel ( The Troubled Man , 2009), where he is also losing his memory to dementia.

Pinterest Kenneth Branagh as Inspector Kurt Wallander in the BBC’s drama series based on Henning Mankell’s bestselling books. Photograph: BBC/Left Bank Pictures/Yellow Bird The extraordinary global success of Swedish and later Norwegian crime fiction as a form of escapist literature for men had several causes. One is that police work is one of the last wholly unionised jobs in the world, so that our hero will never be sacked for anything other than gross misconduct – of which he, being the hero, is never really guilty. In the optimistic 60s, James Bond was distinguished from other middle-aged men by his licence to kill but by the 90s the policeman as a fantasy hero had a licence to keep his job. In the economic whirlwind of globalisation, this was something that a lot of frustrated middle-aged men could only dream of. Mankell himself had never been a frustrated middle-aged man. His life was distinguished by a restless energy from the moment he went to sea as a teenager. He was born in Stockholm, the son of a lawyer, Ivar, whose wife, Ingrid, left him the next year.

“It is only what many men do,” Mankell said later, about his mother’s decision to walk out. Ivar moved with his children to Sveg, a small town in the backwoods, where they lived above the courthouse until Mankell was 13, when they moved to Borås, a possibly less dull town outside Gothenburg, a few hundred miles to the south. In those years he read voraciously. He also constructed an imaginary mother to replace the one who had left him. “I work best when imagination is as valuable as reality,” he said later. He remembered his childhood as extremely happy, and Sweden in the late 50s and early 60s as one of the best places in the world to be a child. Henning Mankell: how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer Read more After three years in Borås he dropped out of school and left home, going first to Paris, and then to sea, where he worked on a freighter and loved it. In 1966 he returned to Paris and lived a bohemian life, determined to become a writer.

He took part in the agitations there that led to the student uprising of 1968 but returned to work as a stagehand in Stockholm. There he wrote his first play, about Swedish colonialism. In 1973, he published a novel about the Swedish labour movement and flew to Africa on the proceeds. The continent became a second home to him, and he spent a great deal of his life there after his success made it possible, founding and then running a theatre in Mozambique from 1986 onwards. Africa deepened and sharpened his outrage at the inequalities of the world. He campaigned against Aids and landmines; where drugs against Aids could not be afforded, he encouraged an oral history project, so that the lives and struggles of those who died might be remembered – he dreamed this would be read in a new library of Alexandria in centuries to come. “Africa has taught me that there is so much needless suffering in the world. We could stop it tomorrow: to teach every child in the world to read and write would cost no more than we in the west spend on dog food,” he said. Most of his working life was split between novel writing and theatre work.

He was extraordinarily prolific, publishing as many as three novels a year, and his sales figures eventually topped 40m. The quality might have been uneven but there was no mistaking the passion and generosity behind them. He wrote, always, about subjects he thought really mattered. Wallander was born after Mankell’s return from a long stay in Mozambique, when he saw that Sweden had become a much more racist country than it had seemed in the 60s, when there were hardly any immigrants from outside Scandinavia there. The third in the series, The White Lioness (1993), led to his breakout success from Scandinavia. Mankell had earlier thrown himself wholeheartedly into the leftwing politics of optimism. After returning from Paris he had taken part in the 1968 demonstrations in Stockholm against the Vietnam war and the university system, and spent much of the 70s in Norway on the fringe of a Maoist group to which his then partner belonged. So he was perfectly placed to experience and to articulate the shock and disappointment that arrived with the end of the postwar bubble of hope and prosperity.

That came earlier and more violently to Sweden than to most of western Europe , just as the bubble had inflated earlier and further there in the good years. For the most part his books stayed closely aligned to the conventions of the 20th-century Swedish progressive aesthetic: chiefly that the rich are always morally repulsive; that Christianity is wicked, but the common decency of ordinary people is to be trusted; and that conventional respectability must always conceal and corrupt the real nature beneath, like a plaster beneath which an ulcer is silently growing. There is often some more open and honest society abroad – in the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö this was eastern Europe under Soviet rule – and the books are also marked by a profound sexual pessimism: a sense that you will find greater happiness and truer friendship among the people with whom you share an office than among those with whom you share your bed. Yet cheerfulness keeps breaking through. There is little nihilism in Swedish noir: good and bad are always clearly distinguished all the way through to the cartoonish culmination of the genre in Stieg Larsson ’s trilogy about Lisbeth Salander: the problem for the heroes is that good no longer corresponds neatly with the Swedish state.

There is still no doubt that good is somewhere to be found. Evil is firmly located in reassuringly wicked villains. This is what allows the genre to perform its traditional function of reassurance despite the horror of the crimes. Henning Mankell in quotes: 10 of the best Read more The extraordinary global success of Wallander did not slow Mankell down much, nor diminish his engagement in global causes. He wrote a trilogy about an African girl who lost both legs after stepping on a landmine, and her struggles as she grows up. He wrote one novel in which a Chinese man massacres an entire family in a remote Swedish village as revenge for the treatment meted out by their ancestors to his in the US in the 19th century. He took a strongly pro-Palestinian position, repeatedly comparing Israel to South Africa and asserting that it was building a new apartheid society, and he sailed on one of the ships that attempted to break the blockade of Gaza in 2010 and was seized by Israeli commandos. In later years he worried about the surveillance state, and warned that digital technologies were being used to make the individual transparent while governments and corporations could operate in secrecy.

He used some of his fortune for charities, endowing a children’s village in Mozambique , a prize for political theatre in Sweden, and another for writing about the north of the country, where he had spent much of his childhood. In Sveg, a museum was built in his honour in his lifetime. He bought a house outside the town and donated it for the use of writers and playwrights who needed a quiet and peaceful place to work. His personal life showed something of the restlessness of his professional activities: he was married four times and had four sons, Thomas, Marius, Morten and Jon, by various relationships. In 1998 he married Eva Bergman, a daughter of the film director Ingmar . She survives him. • Henning Mankell , writer, born 3 February 1948; died 5 October 2015 Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies - BBC News BBC News Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies 5 October 2015 Image caption The writer was diagnosed with cancer in early 2014 Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, best known for his Wallander series, has died aged 67.

The author discovered he had cancer last year, and wrote about the experience in his last book, Quicksand: What It Means To Be A Human Being. His best-selling novels, which follow policeman Kurt Wallander through Sweden and Mozambique, were turned into a TV drama starring Sir Kenneth Branagh. Sir Kenneth paid tribute, calling the author "a fine writer and a fine man". He was the third actor to play the irascible detective. In Mankell's home country, both Rolf Lassgard and Krister Henriksson played the role. BBC Four screened the latter version in the UK. Image caption Sir Kenneth Branagh plays Wallander in the English-language version In a statement, Sir Kenneth said: "In life and in art Henning Mankell was a man of passionate commitment. I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity. Aside from his stringent political activism, and his decades of work in Africa, he also leaves an immense contribution to Scandinavian literature.

"His loving family, and those privileged to know him, together with readers from all over the world, will mourn a fine writer and a fine man." Born in February 1948, Mankell wrote dozens of plays, novels, children's books and screenplays. But it was for his Wallander series that he was most renowned. The rumpled and gloomy detective got his name when Mankell ran his finger through a telephone directory, but went on to sell more than 40 million books. 'More popular' Mankell's life and career were shaped by the divorce of his parents when he was just two years old. He lived with his father, a judge, and barely saw his mother until he was 15. I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity Kenneth Branagh When the family moved to a remote town in the north of Sweden, the young Mankell immersed himself in books, reading extensively about Africa, and learned that imagination could be an instrument of survival, not just of creativity. "In my mind I created another mother for myself to replace the one who had left," he once said.

"And I think this was me at my best, when the forces of imagination had the same value as the real world." Unimpressed by school, he left at the age of 16 to join the merchant navy, becoming a stevedore labourer on a Swedish ship carrying coal and iron ore. Two years later, he set up home in Paris, barely scraping a living ("I don't know how I survived," he said) but thriving on the student activism and political debate After a year and a half, he returned to Stockholm to work as a stagehand. There, aged 20, he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park, about Swedish colonial interests in 19th Century South America. His debut novel, The Stone-Blaster, soon followed. Kurt Wallander first appeared in 1989's Faceless Killers, investigating a murder in which the only clue is that the perpetrators appear to have been foreigners. When that information was leaked to the public, it triggered a series of racially-motivated attacks, explored in the book through the themes of racism and national identity in Sweden.

At first, the author was unaware he had created a recurring character, "but then I realised after two or three novels that I had this… instrument who could be useful". Speaking to the Telegraph in 2011, he said : "I wanted to show how difficult it is to be a good police officer. But after, I think, the third novel, I spoke to this friend of mine and asked what sort of disease I could give him. Without hesitating, she said: 'Diabetes!' So I gave him diabetes and that made him more popular. "I mean, you could never imagine James Bond giving himself a shot of insulin, but with Wallander it seemed perfectly natural." Image copyright Reuters Image caption Among his accolades, Mankell received the Gold Dagger Award; the Astrid Lindgren Prize and the Erich-Maria-Remarque Peace Award (pictured) Although he became known as a leading proponent of "Scandi Crime", Mankell was not a fan of genre fiction.

"I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things," he said, citing Macbeth as the best crime story he had ever read, and John Le Carre as a key influence. "He investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society; and I hope to do the same," he told The Guardian. Sir Kenneth tried to bring the same gravitas to his TV portrayal of the detective. "We're not taking lightly the idea of people being murdered," he told the BBC in 2010 . "Wallander demands that he and his colleagues care and the drama invites the audience to do the same." 'Catastrophe' Throughout his adult life, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran a theatre company and devoted time to the fight against Aids. He was active in the "memory books" project, which encourages parents with HIV to record their stories, not just for their children but for future generations. Shortly after New Year 2014, the author went to see an orthopaedic surgeon in Stockholm with what he assumed was a slipped disc.

But tests revealed a tumour in his lung, another in his neck, and evidence the cancer had spread throughout his body. "It was a catastrophe for me," he told US radio station NPR last year . "Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I'd die of something else." His survivors include his wife of 17 years, Eva Bergman - the daughter of Ingmar Bergman's second wife, the dancer Ellen Lundstrom - and his son, Jon Mankell, a film producer who helped bring Stieg Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series to the big screen. People - Nordstjernan People 10.05.2015 Henning Mankell, a Swedish legend The father of modern Nordic noir, renowned Swedish crime writer, children's author and dramatist Henning Mankell has died. Henning Mankell, one of Sweden's most famous crime writers, has died. Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948.

In his lifetime he wrote some 40 novels and plays, including a dozen books with fictional detective Kurt Wallander, translated into 40 languages and sold around the world. After an 18-month battle with cancer the author died at age 67 in Gothenburg on October 5, 2015. "Henning Mankell was one of the great Swedish writers, loved by readers here at home and around the world," said his publishers. His books about Wallander, the detective in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, have been turned into television series in Swedish as well as English. Mankell also wrote numerous plays and children's books, and in 1996 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Prize for excellence in children's writing. ADVERTISEMENT In recent years, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Africa, active in critical social issues in Africa and directing at various theaters. He was the artistic director of a theater in Maputo, Mozambique. He founded Leopard Publishing House, where his later books were published, in 2001 with his colleague and friend of 40 years, Dan Israel.

Israel said on Monday that Sweden had lost "one of its greatest Swedish authors" of all time. "(Mankell's) work was so infinitely greater than just being a crime writer," he said. "He wrote plays, debate books, everything. He was always driven by the same burning passion to give people the tools to understand, first and foremost, their reality." Mankell leaves a widow Eva Bergman, 70, the daughter of Swedish cinema great Ingmar Bergman, and his son Jon. Read here for more about Sweden through fictional characters by Mankell and other prominent contemporary Swedish writers. Author and dramatist Henning Mankell.

Photo: Leopard Fï¿½rlag/Lina Ikse No more Wallander books after author's death: publisher No more Wallander books after author's death: publisher Share View photos A picture of Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell and copies of some of his books are displayed inside a window of the Swedish publishing company Leopard in Stockholm on October 5, 2015 (AFP Photo/Jonathan Nackstrand) More Stockholm (AFP) - Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, who died Monday, was adamant that his characters, including detective Kurt Wallander, should never be resurrected by a another writer, his publisher said. "It is out of the question that there would be other books featuring Wallander," Dan Israel, the Swedish publisher with whom Mankell founded the Leopard publishing house in 2001, said on Tuesday. Israel stressed that he would therefore oppose any attempt at reviving Mankell's characters in new novels. In doing so he takes the opposite tack from the publishers of the "Millennium" series. The first trilogy was created by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson.

A fourth book in that series, by another crime writer, was published earlier this year, over a decade after Larsson's sudden death in 2004. Similarly since James Bond creator Ian Fleming died in1964 there have been a string of new Bond books produced. The best-selling Mankell, whose detective Kurt Wallander character became a worldwide phenomenon, died aged 67 on Monday after a battle with cancer. Mankell wrote and published a final book wrapping up the Wallander series, "The Troubled Man", in 2009. His publisher Israel said he would protect the literary heritage of his friend and collaborator, while adding that he remained unaware of the details of Mankell's will. "Nothing can be approved without my agreement," he said. Mankell was working on a book before his death which is just a draft and unpublishable, he added. Mankell, who divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, was a leading light in the Nordic police thriller genre. His Wallander character became the star of successful TV drama series in both Swedish and English. "Without him, the Nordic police novel wouldn't have more than an echo abroad...

but he was much more than a thriller writer," said Israel. As well as his 12 Wallander books, Mankell also wrote another 30 works, including 10 children's books. Some 40 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. Reblog Wallander author Henning Mankell dies in Sweden aged 67 Wallander author Henning Mankell dies in Sweden aged 67 Tom Porter Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell More Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, author of the Wallander series, has died aged 67. Mankell's Swedish publisher Leopard said that best-selling crime novelist died in his sleep early this morning (5 October) in Gothenburg. The writer discovered he had cancer in 2014, writing of his experiences in his last book Quicksand: What it Means to be a Human Being. His crime novels featuring melancholic detective Kurt Wallander sold more than 40 million copies. They were adapted for television series both in Sweden, with first Rolf Lassgard then Krister Henriksson in the title role, and also by the BBC, starring Sir Kenneth Branagh.

Dividing his time between Mozambique and Sweden, Mankell also wrote dozens of plays, novels and children's books. It was Mankell's Wallander books that earned him a reputation as one of the key figures of so-called 'Scandinavian Noir', which combined suspense, with morally complex central protagonists, and themes exploring the dark underbelly of Swedish society. Abandoned by his mother, Mankell and his two siblings moved in with his father, a judge, in the small town of Sveg, in northern Sweden. View photos Kenneth Branagh as detective Kurt Wallander More He went to sea in a Swedish merchant marine vessel at 16, then lived in Paris, becoming involved in student politics. He had his first play produced at 19, becoming a theatre director and touring the country with drama productions. In Mozambique, he ran a theatre company, and devoted time to the battle against Aids, encouraging parents with HIV to record their experiences for their children and for posterity. His first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers, was published in 1991, when he was 43. It won the Glass Key Award, given annually to a Scandinavian crime writer.

The millions earned through the success of the novels did not temper his commitment to often controversial political causes. A fierce critic of Israel, he compared its policies to the apartheid policies of South Africa, and in 2010 was arrested on board a flotilla of vessels that attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He was married four times and is survived by his wife, Eva Bergman (daughter of the film director Ingmar Bergman) and son Jon Mankell, a film producer. Related Articles Wallander author Henning Mankell dead at 67 Monday 5 October 2015 at 1:07PM Henning Mankell, bestselling writer of the Wallander novels, has died aged 67. The writer passed away in his sleep in Goteborg, Sweden, according to a statement on his website, which describes him as "one of the great Swedish authors of our time". "His books have sold more than 40 million copies and are translated into more than 40 languages,” it continues.

“Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end." Mankell was diagnosed with cancer in January of last year, and wrote about the experience in his book Quicksand: What It Means to Be a Human Being. Born in February 1948, Mankell was prolific across multiple genres, writing everything from plays to children’s books. However, he is best known for the gloomy Wallander crime stories, the first of which, Faceless Killers, was published in 1991. The novels found a new audience on television, with Swedish versions starring Rolf Lassgård and Krister Henriksson followed by a British remake with Kenneth Branagh as detective Kurt Wallander, a name Mankell once claimed had come straight out of the phonebook. Branagh paid tribute to Mankell, calling him "a man of passionate commitment". "I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity," said Branagh. "Aside from his stringent political activism, and his decades of work in Africa, he also leaves an immense contribution to Scandanavian literature.

"His loving family, and those privileged to know him, together with readers from all over the world, will mourn a fine writer and a fine man." Mankell is survived by wife Eva Bergman and his son Jon Mankell. Notable deaths in 2015 Notable deaths in 2015 Share View photos Egyptian-born "Doctor Zhivago" film legend Omar Sharif, died July 10, 2015, of a heart attack in a Cairo hospital aged 83 (AFP Photo/Karim Sahib) More Paris (AFP) - From legendary Egyptian actor Omar Sharif to Germany's ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Nobel-winning author Gunter Grass, here are some of the notable figures who died in 2015: - January - 3: Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected black US senator, aged 95. - 11: Swedish "Dolce Vita" actress Anita Ekberg in hospital outside Rome aged 83. - 23: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz aged around 90 after suffering from pneumonia.

- 25: Greek larger-than-life singer Demis Roussos, in Athens aged 68. - 29: Australian "Thorn Birds" author, Colleen McCullough aged 77 in hospital off Australia's eastern coast. - 31: Former German president Richard von Weizsaecker, a member of the Christian Democrat party, aged 94. - February - - 6: Algerian feminist novelist Assia Djebar, aged 78 in a hospital in Paris. - 6: South African writer and outspoken critic of apartheid Andre Brink aged 79, on board a flight home from Belgium. - 14: Italian Nutella owner and billionaire Michele Ferrero, aged 89. - 14: Veteran French actor Louis Jourdan, star of "Gigi" at his Beverly Hills home in Los Angeles aged 93. - 21: US jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, aged 94, in an Istanbul hospital. - 27: "Star Trek's" Mr Spock, US actor Leonard Nimoy, aged 83 at his home in Los Angeles.

- 28: Yasar Kemal, one of Turkey's most celebrated writers, aged 92, in an Istanbul hospital. - March - - 12: British science-fantasy "Discworld" author Terry Pratchett aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. - 20: Australia's former conservative prime minister Malcolm Fraser, after a short illness at the age of 84. - 23: Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, aged 91 in hospital after suffering from pneumonia. - 26: Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, aged 83. - April - - 2: Portuguese cinema legend Manoel de Oliveira, aged 106. - 10: Former Australian cricket captain and commentator Richie Benaud, aged 84 in hospital after suffering from skin cancer. - 13: Germany's Nobel-winning author, Gunter Grass aged 87, in hospital in the northern city of Luebeck. - 13: Uruguayan leftist writer Eduardo Galeano, aged 74 in a Montevideo hospital after suffering from lung cancer.

- 14: American soul icon Percy Sledge aged 74 in the American state of Louisiana, of liver cancer. - May - - 2: British crime writer Ruth Rendell, of "Chief Inspector Wexford" fame, aged 85 in hospital after suffering a stroke. - 14: B.B. King, the face of American blues worldwide, aged 89 in Las Vegas. - 30: Beau Biden, the eldest son of US Vice President Joe Biden and the former attorney general of Delaware, of brain cancer aged 46. - June - - 5: Iraq's Tareq Aziz, the voice of Saddam Hussein's regime, in an Iraqi hospital aged 79 after many years of poor health as a convicted prisoner. - 7: British Dracula actor Christopher Lee, aged 93, in hospital in London. - 11: US saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman in New York aged 85. - 17: Turkey's former president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel, in an Ankara hospital aged 90 of heart failure.

- 22: American "Titanic" music composer James Horner in a plane crash in California aged 61. - 25: British actor Patrick Macnee, star of 1960s British spy series "The Avengers" at his home in California, aged 93. - 26: Russia's former prime minister, foreign minister and master spy Yevgeny Primakov aged 85. - July - - 1: Nicholas Winton, known as the English Schindler for saving hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis before World War II, aged 106, near London. - 9: Saudi Arabia's Prince Saud al-Faisal, born in 1940 and the world's longest serving foreign minister, in the United States. - 10: Egyptian-born "Doctor Zhivago" film legend Omar Sharif, of a heart attack in a Cairo hospital aged 83. - 11: Japan's Nintendo's chief executive Satoru Iwata of cancer aged 55.

- 26: Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only child of US pop legend Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, aged 22, six months after she was found unconscious in a bathtub in her Atlanta, Georgia, home. - August - - 15: Pioneering US civil rights activist Julian Bond, aged 75 in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. - 19: Senegal's master drummer Doudou Ndiaye Rose aged 85 in a Dakar hospital. - 22: The former "first lady" of Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime Ieng Thirith aged 83 in a former Khmer stronghold on the border with Thailand - 30: Renowned British neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks aged 82 in New York of cancer. - 30: American horror film master Wes Craven aged 76 at his Los Angeles home of brain cancer. - September - - 5: Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, 67, of detective Kurt Wallander fame, in Gothenburg of cancer. - 14: Benin's former military ruler and civilian president Mathieu Kerekou, aged 82.

- 24: "How Green Was My Valley" Irish actress Maureen O'Hara, aged 95, at home in Boise, Idaho. - November - - 3: Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi, a key lobbyist for the US-led invasion of Iraq who was blamed for providing false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, of a heart attack aged 71. - 10: Former West German chancellor, master of "realpolitik" Helmut Schmidt, aged 96. - 18: New Zealand's rugby legend Jonah Lomu, aged 40, after suffering from kidney disease. - December - - 15: Licio Gelli, a masonic grand master implicated in some of the darkest chapters of Italy's post-war history aged 96. - 19: Germany's Kurt Masur, the conductor who used music to ease German reunification and comfort New York after September 11, aged 88. - 23: Hocine Ait-Ahmed, one of the fathers of Algeria's struggle for independence from France, in Lausanne, Switzerland aged 89.

- 28: Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, the hell-raising frontman of British heavy metal band Motorhead, of cancer aged 70. Reblog

Question: Which Swedish crime writer and dramatist died in October 2015 aged 67?
Answer: HENNING MANKELL